VB.net advanced: How to achieve serialization

This article tries to use the simplest example to introduce how to do serialization.

The basic way of serialization is as follows: The object is sent to Formatter,formatter to serialize it to form a stream. This stream can be a file stream, or something else.

+-------------+
+------+ | | Serialize +----------+
| object|===>| Formatter |------------------>| Stream |
+------+ | | +----------+
+-------------+

Here, we serialize a randomly generated array and save it to a file, then take it out of the file and deserialize it to retrieve the array.

The first is to define an array:
Dim Nums (Ten) as Integer

Then you generate the contents of the array:
Dim I as Integer
For i = 0 to 10
Nums (i) = Int (Rnd () * 500) + 100
Next

Serialization is accomplished by formatter objects. We want to create a new formatter object:
Dim Sfformatter as New System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary.BinaryFormatter
The BinaryFormatter is binary serialized. Other serialization methods you can find in the Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.

We also need a stream to be serialized as output:
Dim FStream as New FileStream ("1.dat", FileMode.Create)

Ready to work, you can now call the formatter Serialize method for serialization:
Sfformatter.serialize (FStream, Nums)

Finally, don't forget to close the stream:
Fstream.close ()

Deserialization is a very similar way, except that the formatter deserialize method is invoked. The code is like this:
Private Sub Deserialize ()
Dim FStream as New FileStream ("1.dat", FileMode.Open)
Dim Sfformatter as New System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary.BinaryFormatter
Nums = Sfformatter.deserialize (fstream)
Fstream.close ()
End Sub

Serialization is as simple as that. This is just a serialized array of integers. If you want to serialize the object of a custom class, you need to precede the definition of the class with the following:
<serializable () >

There are more advanced applications for serialization, for example, you can specify which members of a class cannot be serialized, and define their own serialization interfaces. This article ends here. If you want to learn more, go and find MSDN!